Users and providers of Univention Corporate Server now can add ONLYOFFICE Online Editors to their infrastructure from Univention App Center.

ONLYOFFICE is now a part of the Univention App family and complements it with a full-scale collaborative suite that offers editors for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It is 100% compatible with Microsoft Office files and supports all popular document formats.

Launched in 2014 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the University of Michigan, and Mozilla, the Let’s Encrypt project recently issued its 100 millionth automated, free certificate and is thus truly living up to its slogan of “Encrypt the entire web”.

In the aftermath of the Snowdon revelations of 2013, Let’s Encrypt declared its goal of making SSL/TLS certificates available for everyone on the Internet and promoting free encryption on the web. Since then, the project has won over a wide range of notable companies and acquired sponsors such as Akamai and Cisco as well as most recently Netflix.

Our App Center team has been busy as usual, releasing four Apps from the Univention App Center as App Appliances. An App Appliance bundles UCS and an App in a virtual machine. The Appliances are available for the virtualization and cloud formats KVM, VMware, and VirtualBox. In addition to the pre-configured App, they also contain a pre-configured UCS system and a management system for administrating the App itself and its users. App Appliances are thus a particularly easy way to start an App without having to install it via the in UCS integrated Univention App Center.

The professional structure of domains and the use of domain controllers bring order to IT infrastructures. This is especially important when organizations are growing rapidly. Professional domain management allows their IT to grow dynamically. Otherwise, the infrastructure becomes a kind of “patchwork carpet” of many small solutions and unorganized resources, some of which act independently of each other, may interfere with each other and thus require a high level of maintenance. Not to mention the complexity of maintaining users twice as often and the risks associated with data replication, data protection, and system reliability.

In the following article, we first explain briefly what a domain is and then describe the tasks of a domain controller. Finally, we become practical and see how the concept of “domain/domain controllers” has been implemented in Univention Corporate Server.

One of the highlights of the second point release of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) are the significant enhancements UCS 4.2-2 offers for managing services and apps that are hosted in public cloud services such as the Amazon Marketplace. Services installed on UCS can now be accessed directly without any further configuration effort. Our development department has extended access to these services via the UCS Portal by converting the links to relative links. For portal entries for which there are several links, heuristic procedures determine the best link.

Since the last update, there is a now a new feature in the Univention App Center: “App Settings”. It allows simple configuration of an App from within the Univention Management Console. We developed this new feature so as to allow App Providers to improve the integration depth of an App in UCS and simplify the set-up of an App considerably with easy-to-use tools.

In this brief introduction we want to give you an idea of some important concepts for identity and access management (IAM), and of the related challenges organizations face. We will also see how IAM is one of UCS strengths and why UCS is being adopted by large companies, and by governmental institutions, to manage tens of million identities.

After the waves of attack by ransomware WannaCry in May and its successor Petya in June, agitation prevails in many IT departments. The economic damage is now already in the billions and CIOs are under great pressure to protect companies and their users from new attacks. But how can you protect your company against these attacks, which have the potential to destroy all files?

In the owncloud blog we announced a number of new features to better protect your data. As the free community edition of ownCloud is also available in the Univention App Center, I am glad to share this inform with you here today:

A total of 9 times we have now awarded the Univention Prize. The objective of this competition was to support the employment of Open Source in a university context and make it known to a broad public. The response impressed us. In some years, there were almost 40 bachelor, master or diploma theses submitted for the competition.

And the broad press coverage in well-known media such as heise.de, the Linux Magazine, Pro-Linux or golem.de certainly contributed to deliver the message to a wide audience that Open Source has nothing to do with spaghetti code, idealism or even stubborn dogmatism. So you could say: The goal is reached!

Workplaces become more remote and mobile while individuals are increasingly equipped with (private) mobile devices. In this context it is good to know about RADIUS, because private end devices require simple access to an organization’s network. At the same time you need to avoid that these devices open the doors for malware or leakage. RADIUS is such an instrument for the construction of secure, decentralized work structures and equally a powerful tool for the authentication of mobile device accesses to networks.

In the following, we like to give you a brief understanding of what RADIUS is and how you can use it with UCS.